CBD Journal with Ray Ricker (March 15th)

Hello again. Hope everyone’s season is off to a good start. We have just gotten back from our spring trip with a ton of positives and some negatives including my Kenny Powers Oakley Sunglass tan. The weather was great down in the Fort Pierce area it was in the 80’s which was great for my golf game and even better for us northerners to get a chance and be outside again to play some baseball.

The 2011 Eagles played 6 games down in Florida going 5-1 on the Spring Break Trip. It was great being back in Florida usually we play schools in North Carolina but we came back to the sunshine state for one of our seniors Ralph Dieguez who is from Miami, so it was great for him to play in front of his family while celebrating his birthday during the trip. The theme of our trip has been the theme of our season, starting pitching. The pitching staff has been throwing some unbelievable games to keep our team in games this season. Steve “Sergeant Shutout” Corbett is 2-0 with a save and has not given up a run all season, (hope I didn’t jinx him) while Dan Steers, Cutler Ruby, John Jeanes, and Tom Sirois have all given us solid starts. Our bullpen of Evan Anderson, Hayden Allred, and Steve Kimmelman have also done a great job of picking each other up and not skipping a beat once they are called upon. Our offense has been solid we are doing a good job of sticking to our approach and hitting gaps, it is still early but these guys are putting great swings on the ball and have a ton of extra base hits lead by seniors Ralph Dieguez and Alex Jahn.

Florida and road trips wouldn’t be complete without some great antics by our guys. It all started at Applebees when our guys had our waitress come out with a Happy Birthday Song for Head Coach AJ McNamara (which it wasn’t) however the waitress decided that giving an ice cream wasn’t good enough, they were going to whip cream him in the face, after the players talked the waitress out of getting Coach Mac they settled on getting our newest coach, Coach Ganz. They unloaded on him like I have never seen before which was a great way to start the trip. Our freshman catcher Jeff St. Pierre also has some strange, strange antics. Jeff likes to send text messages to the players in the middle of the night, they are all PG, the texts are of kittens. Yes, kittens playing with yarn or just sitting there. Defiantly entertaining to hear about and always good for a laugh, Jeff will be a player to watch in the future for us and I can’t wait to see what he does next.

What’s next for the 2011 Eagles? Its breaking out our Under Armour Cold Gear and getting ready for our Northern schedule. We open up conference play on Saturday with a couple of non conference games on Wednesday and Thursday. All the games on our schedule are battles and I am anxious to see how we answer the challenge. We were fortunate to be ranked this week #9 in the East Region and it will give us another opportunity to show how good we can be. We want to be the hunted rather then the hunters and I think we are finally realizing what it takes to play at a championship level.

Until next week you can follow me on Twitter @CoachRix8 for an even closer look into the team and what is going on with myself and the 2011 Post University Eagles.

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